The Hidden Curriculum: Reflections on Control, Racism, and the Infamous Food Fight

by Cecilia Meza, AES 340 student

One point that stuck with me during this week’s discussion was the curriculums within the various districts. It was Kirstens Robbins’ reading that really gave me a flashback to my own experiences in school. There’s the hidden curriculum of control of the students, and the way they view themselves.

I’ve discussed this story before in class, but to give another brief refresher, my racist library teacher made a racist comment about the Mexican students being bad kids while white kids were good kids. Not gonna lie, recounting that story is still a little triggering because that was during the 2016 election, and it seemed liked all of a sudden, I noticed everyone hating Mexicans because of the influence of a certain politician. This librarian teacher was just the first instance where I actually noticed and felt racism directed towards me and my people.

The participants saw themselves as unruly, dangerous, unmotivated, and in need of the school’s intervention, even as they expressed their resentment for it. The school’s curriculum of control changed the ways in which the students felt about themselves and each other. While they claimed to wish they did not have to follow so many rules, anytime I asked about what it would be like if the rules went away, the participants insisted that the student bodies were too unruly. They believed that student bodies were too dangerous to be allowed to remain undisciplined by the authority of the school. This is made more complex because it is not only the students in the building who come to believe these messages, but all of the adults as well. The messages subtly acted on everyone, even me.

Robbins, K. (2018). Resisting a curriculum of control. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 33(1), 59-69.  https://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/720/pdf

Anyways, when Robbins said that students begin to believe these narratives that they’re all inherently bad students if they were not being controlled, I thought about how when my librarian teacher made that racist comment, I, too, started to believe that Mexicans were bad kids. I desperately wanted to fit in and be considered a good kid, yet I was still punished more severely than my white classmates. And what’s worse was that I blamed myself. I kept thinking about what I could have done differently to gain my teachers’ favor. 

Another way I noticed the curriculum of control was when I was thinking back to my middle school days. The middle school in my hometown is the DEFINITION OF STRICT. Like, it’s ridiculous. Girls were not allowed to show shoulders, we were not allowed to have holes in our jeans. If we did, we were sent to the office, and they made us put sticky notes or duck tape over the holes in our jeans.

Yet the best part to my middle school’s controlling curriculum was lunch time. During lunch time, every grade level would be sent to lunch at different times, which was reasonable as it was a small gym. However, when we would find a spot to sit, we were told to stay in that spot for the rest of the lunch period. If you needed to go to the bathroom, you had to ask a para-pro. You were not even allowed to turn around in your seat during lunch. I remember one time I got yelled at by a para-pro to turn around and face forward in my seat. You weren’t allowed to talk to the kids behind you!

Thinking back to Robbins observations, schools convince children to believe that things would go haywire if they were allowed to move freely. Well, this next story I’m about to tell sorta contradicts the that. One time during lunch, I saw that the students down the table from me were sneakily tossing food in small amounts from their end of the gym to the other tables in front of them. Nothing much, just a carrot, or a grape. Children from the other tables noticed, because I saw food being tossed back to our end of the gym. Things escalated within seconds, and I saw applesauce cups being thrown, frozen fruit cups, and even a carton of chocolate milk was thrown high into the air. It landed on a girl wearing a white sweater. Once it was clear that there was a food fight in the gym, everyone immediately ran away from the tables, going to the sidelines of the gym, even the kids who initiated the food fight.

Anyways, back to my point . . . I feel like the more schools treat students as creatures that must be tamed and constantly disciplined, the more students will give them a reason to think that way; hence the infamous food fight in my middle school.